Problems with firewire on windows 7

As you can see in the picture, the Firewire cards have a power connector that you need to connect to your computer's power supply. If you don't connect a power supply connector to it, it will not function properly. NOTE: Firewire cards do not have or need a power supply connection.

Beside the Firewire cards giving us problems for video capture, other people have had reported to us that they had problem with video capturing with Firewire cards. I tested the 12 different Firewire cards, most of them were identical to the ones in the pictures above, they were just being sold under different brand name. No matter what I tried, I just could not get them to work with these devices. They would only connect to the Sony DSR editing deck. The TI chipset cards gave me so many problems, so please stay away from them and only get the VIA chipset card.

We could not get either Firewire cards to work with video capture. But they did work with an older scanner. What about a Firewire to Thunderbolt adapter? It will only show up as a Thunderbolt port in Device Manager and not as a Firewire port. As I stated above, the Firewire driver looks for a Firewire chipset on either the motherboard or on an expansion card that is plugged into one of the slots on the motherboard.

I have talked to about 14 different people on various forums about capturing MiniDV footage this way and only 2 people said they were able to get this to work, everyone else were unsuccessful.

I recently tried using these adapters myself and I could not get it work. So I don't recommend wasting your money and time on Thunderbolt adapters as a way to capture video from a MiniDV camcorder or MiniDV editing deck, they don't work for that.

Most video capture software or audio processing software or scanner software need to work directly with the IEEE Firewire driver and the Firewire driver will never see a Firewire port chipset since it is not built-in to the motherboard or installed in an expansion slot.

With all of that said, I have seen people who have used the above adapters to connect an external Firewire hard drive to a computer via the Thunderbolt port, with success.

These adapters do NOT work for video and audio transfers. FireWire transfers data as a steady stream, while a USB connection transfers data as packets and thus they are not compatible. While there are Firewire to USB hubs not adapters as shown below , these are more expensive than a FireWire card for your computer and some users have complained that the hubs are problematic.

Users have reported that they have electrically damaged the Firewire port on their camera or electrically damaged the USB port on their computer when attempting to use a Firewire to USB adapter. Firewire Ports that are built-in to the Motherboard. You will need to make sure this is set to Enable or ON. Some software only allow you to work with footage that comes from an SD card or from the Hard Drive. We use Vegas Pro and Vegas Movie Studio and both of those software packages support capturing video through the Firewire port.

Make sure what ever video capture program you are using, that you turn off the Device Control in the video capture program.

If it is not turned off, you may run into problems trying to capture the video footage. Depending the the software you may also need a special driver for the audio software, in addition to the Firewire Driver. Farther down in the article, under Step 13, I show you have to check to see if the Device Manage will see the connected audio device.

Using a Firewire connection with a Photo an Slide Scanners If you have a scanner, such as a Nikon scanner, you may find it will not work with Windows 10, even if you have a built-in Firewire port or a Firewire expansion card. The problem here is the scanner driver or software will not work under Windows Download the demo version of the software and try it out. This have solved problems for people using Canon, Nikon and a host of other scanners that are connected through the Firewire port.

Don't worry if the scanner doesn't show up in the Device Manager, as long as the device manager sees the Firewire card, the above scanner software should find it. NOTE: I have heard from a lot of people having problems when trying to use a Firewire card with a TI chipset with their scanner, even the the scanning software. As soon as they switched to a Firewire card with the VIA chipset, like the ones I have shown you above, they had no more problems.

Mouse Clicks In this article, when we say to Click or Left Click , you will use the Left mouse button, as shown below. When we say Right Click , you want to click the Right mouse button, as shown below. Here we will show you step by step instructions, along with screen shots on downloading, installing and setting up the Firewire Drives. For Windows 7 users, please skip down to the section titled "The Fix for Windows 7".

However, Microsoft left out the Legacy Firewire driver version. Please follow these steps below exactly as they are written. In fact, you might want to read through them first, the go back and follow each step. I have provided screen shots for each step. If you are running Windows 8, the steps are exactly the same for Windows Then once you have downloaded the installer, follow the instructions below.

Find where you downloaded the file to. NOTE: It will only take a second or two to install and it may not show you any messages when it is done installing. This will install the Firewire Legacy Drivers. NOTE: It will only take a second or two to install and then it returns you to the folder with no message that it has installed.

But, don't worry it has installed. Sunday, April 18, PM. Hi cdor, Did you find any solution. Please let me know if you find any solutions coolcarnee. Friday, April 30, AM.

Glad to report that using the legacy device worked for me. Thanks John. Thursday, May 6, AM. Someone at Microsoft please explain to me why these new drivers are used by default when they simply do not work with so many existing firewire devices? Tuesday, May 18, PM. Out of Options in Peoria. Saturday, May 22, PM. Devspo, I have the exact same machine; I can't use my firewire devices either. Wednesday, June 2, PM. I switched it to the legacy drivers, and nothing.

I switched it to the newer drivers, again nothing. I've never even seen the third driver option. Should I rip the firewire driver from my xp version? I know my device works because I have a second comp running XP 64bit and it shows up fine there it's about the only thing compatible with XP I need the firewire for video editing.

Nothing else works regarding consumer grade cameras. Friday, June 4, PM. I also have a HP win7 64 bit Core i7 Q 1. I also have a Toshiba older laptop which using the legacy driver now is working great. I think the problem is with the HP dv6 laptop, maybe with the bundle firewire port.

Sunday, June 13, AM. Oh my, thank you so much. This explanation have helping me very much. Now i can finally capture back from my digital JVC camcorder. Wednesday, June 23, PM. This workaround worked for me to copy files larger than 1. However, I find it somewhat unacceptable that this step is necessary. It should have been fixed in Windows Update before now!

Thursday, July 1, PM. Thanks you very much for this fix Monday, July 12, PM. Thanks to JZ et al. Friday, July 30, PM. I've tried this: 1- Click the Start Button, type devmgmt. Monday, September 13, PM.

My 1st issue Changed to legacy, problem solved! The external HDD was now running quite quickly. Plug the Audio inferface back in and it seemed OK. That was while it was only running the 1st 8 channels of audio. Expanding to 16 channels, gives me glitching and my full 28 channels Sunday, September 19, AM.

I can't believe that after almost a year and MS still can not figure out a way to fix the slowness. I have wasted so many time on this slow speed since I bought the Firewire card. My fried's Mac or even Linux can handle Firewire smoothly.

Saturday, October 16, PM. Thank you for taking the time to advise. I've tried the above suggestion many times over and just can't get a connection.

Could that be the problem? I thought the camera drivers would load automatically. Sunday, October 17, AM. Saturday, October 30, PM. Hello John. Wednesday, November 3, PM. I too have had this problem and none of the drivers worked. I had to switch on my old XP Pro system to get a connection, although this was erratic and took a while to recognise. Maybe my camera was getting old? This is not the solution I was talking about. I plugged it in and voila - it worked straight away in Ubuntu, Win 7 and XP.

It now runs perfect. Try to use the original cable or one by the same makers of the camera or device you are attaching. After hours spent in frustration it now works every time in a super fast way. Wednesday, November 10, PM. Thanks for any advice! Tuesday, November 16, PM. It has solved my prob with slow speed on b and a After seeing everyone's posts on here having the same problem as me, I was beginning to give up hope until I came accross this link.

Many Thanks Nainesh. Friday, December 31, AM. Monday, January 3, PM. Hi Nainesh squealer , Unfortunately, I did not have as much luck with the Unibrain driver for my situation due to one of my WD External Hard Drives is not compatible with Windows 7. Tuesday, January 11, PM. Going to try some of these suggestions later. Wednesday, January 19, AM.

Trehan-Young 0. Thank you worked at treat!! Wednesday, January 26, PM. I have Tascam Fw and windows 7 ultimate and I can't hear sound from my mixer!!! I download driver from tascam 1. Problem is still there. I updated driver and all other but nothing All best. Thursday, February 3, AM. Thank you so much for this answer. I was just now contemplating installing a Windows XP dual-boot and only now sought this answer because I had failed to make a disk for my SATA drivers because for some reason my USB floppy drive wasn't recognizing disks.

As you can see, I've put a lot of effort into getting my computer to capture from my DV camera. And now this simple driver fix made everything work perfectly. Thank you! Friday, February 4, AM. John, You are a master. Monday, February 14, PM. The fix for me was the correct hardware driver used for the IEEE port with windows 7. In my HP laptop there is a Ricoh 5 in 1 card reader. Next to it is the port. I downloaded and installed. The Microsoft supplied legacy and Ricoh drivers did not work but the one from HP did.

Tuesday, March 1, PM. There are many problems which interfere with the chipsets, especially in laptops. Secondary steps after the legacy drive change are as follows. I hope this will help some of you out. Peace Simon Handley. Saturday, March 5, PM. Thursday, April 21, AM.

Well Simon im in the Audio world as well. Upgraded to a quad core 2. Delta ltx2, Pro-tools, Wavelab, and tons others. HD-Lacie d2 quadra 1tb Firewire card-no idea not listed brand.

So how do get into that Bios no idea what that is and tweak that speedstep? Need to finish these mixes for this band ASAP. Thanx MM. Friday, April 22, AM. I will bookmark it so John, please stay on it. Thank you sooooooo much. Thursday, June 2, PM. Sunday, July 3, AM. John, Thanks for posting this. Monday, August 22, PM. My solution was the cable. Tuesday, November 1, PM. Solution: I had the exact same problem and it was pure luck that led me to the solution.

I scoured the web and all I could get was this suggestion about turning the Firewire drivers to Legacy. But it didn't work. The reason is that it was only part of the problem. It turns out that this is a weird Windows 7 bug with powered Firewire and USB devices conntecting to ports ie does not recognize H2 Zoom but would recognize USB thumbsticks that is related to Apple software conflicting with powered devices that connect through those ports.

I stumbled upon another Microsft solutions page that listed removing all the Apple software as a possible solution. I was at my limit trying to guess what the solution was so I just figured I'd try it no matter how ridiculous it sounded. There was some Apple Mobile Support software. There was iTunes support.

I removed all of that non-sense. I rebooted and I was partway there, because I could actually see the Firewire hard drive listed as a device finally with an err rather than not being recognized at all. I had to update the drivers for the Disk Drive in Device Manager using the automatic driver update. I rebooted and everything is fine now. So if the Legacy driver alone worked for you, it may have been because you did not have any Apple software installed.

Hopefully this helps some poor soul out there! Answer brought to you by: The Show, www. Friday, November 25, AM. Thanks John Zhu, that worked for me too on Win 7 x Wednesday, December 7, AM. Changing the driver to Legacy fixed the problem. You have saved me many hours Monday, December 12, AM. Friday, March 23, PM. Edited by cptplop Monday, April 2, AM. Monday, April 2, AM. It worked in XP Hello! Windows consider them as one video device : I could solve this problem with buying any video capture card for my second camcoder but quality of streaming will be worse and i dont want it.

Looking forward for answer! Thank you. Thursday, April 5, AM. It seems to me that Windows 7 consider them as one video device : I could solve this problem with buying any video capture card for my second camcoder but quality of streaming will be worse and i dont want it.

I'm looking forward for an answer! I've been trying to get my FW to work for weeks. Thank you, Nainesh Somaiya, for letting us know of this fix, and thanks, squealer for reposting it as I skipped over it the first time, as I didn't have any TI devices. Not only did this work, but it worked WELL! Microsoft: Please call these people and invest some money in allowing the drivers to be autoinstalled for people!

I find it infuriating that you are selling a product for hundreds of dollars, and giving a nonfunctional driver with it! Thursday, April 26, AM. The drive itself works fine but it would be great to be able to install the front panel driver. I have tried the Windows 7 Compatibility Web Site, but this did not help. Regards, Johan. Sunday, May 6, PM. For more information about how to download Microsoft support files, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:.

Microsoft used the most current virus-detection software that was available on the date that the file was posted. The file is stored on security-enhanced servers that help prevent any unauthorized changes to the file.

Right-click the Legacy Right-click the host controller, and then click Update Driver Software. The screen shot of the host controller and the Update Driver Software is listed in the following example:.

The global version of this hotfix installs files that have the attributes that are listed in the following tables. The dates and the times for these files on your local computer are displayed in your local time together with your current daylight saving time DST bias.

Additionally, the dates and the times may change when you perform certain operations on the files. Windows 8. Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section. Open Control Panel in the Category view.

Click Uninstall a program in Control Panel. This driver is only intended to work with legacy host controllers. Therefore, you may experience lower transfer data rates than the b driver.